Family fall-outs are one of several threads running throughout The Tron's Mayfesto season this year.
Following on from the explosion of sisterly feelings in David Ireland’s Everything Between Us, David Harrower’s new play, performed by real-life brother and sister Lewis and Kathryn Howden, is on the surface a more gentler affair.
Athol is a suburban man who long since fled his Edinburgh birthplace for the Renfrewshire town he could only call home after the 2007 Glasgow airport would-be bombers were discovered living there. His sister Morna cleans the houses of posh people in auld Reekie, though the mercurial streak that sent her on her own wayward path remains intact.
When Morna’s son Joshua lands on Athol’s doorstep after a 14-year silence between the siblings, an everyday tale of painful estrangement gradually unravels.
Told in a series of interlocking monologues, Harrower’s story is on one level domestic and sentimental. His observations of the minutiae of human behaviour and all its little flaws are beautifully and touchingly painted, and are delivered by the Howdens in Harrower’s own production with a lovely balance of lightness and pathos.
Yet his stream of local references that catch hold of a real sense of place suggests something bigger, about Scotland, its music and how a reclaiming of its folk traditions – however dysfunctional the reclaiming might be – can bring about some kind of bridge between people.
While this doesn’t always gel, by weaving in real-life events such as the attempted bombing and a 1992 march across the Meadows in Edinburgh, Harrower lends vivid colours to what in lesser hands might end up left in shades of kitchen-sink grey.
HHH
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